Shattered Kingdoms

So, wait, you didn't, without provocation, lash out at the compromised moral fiber of everyone in this thread but you because we are incapable of accepting personal responsibility, P50?

BULL [REDACTED] .

*snore*

If only we could ALL be so virtuous as you and ignore when we're called out for our crap.

Bravo, old man. You're [REDACTED] awesome.



*finds the foe button*

what happens if we foe someone

His or her posts become hidden.

I hadn't thought of a brilliant solution yet. If afterlife threads were somehow tied to retirement, then presumably they could also be hidden from view if the character "un-retired". However, that wouldn't remove the information and discussion from the people who had read the thread. Even so, maybe that's fine.

Another possibility would be that your character really does become permanently retired after only a week or two and at that point the Afterlife thread is allowed.

sometimes people wish they could play the character again after receiving good feedback

I think it's a bad idea Dulrik. You've never been for holding the hand of the weak or incompetent, so why start now? If someone rages, then good riddance.

I would definitely be in favor of retirement only lasting at most a week or two, just to avoid any confusion with the AL forum. It would be awkward to post an AL thread and then decide to return to playing him, and it's also no fun to post an AL thread after the character has been forgotten or gone inactive.

> ... I want to 'reroll'
Been there, done that, even reused names when testing skills and didn't end up doing much RP before figuring out I wasn't gonna have enough fun from the mechanics side of things. That said, if you meet 3 people, reroll, come back as something else, it confuses the heck out of those 3 people. If you're recreating enough times that you run out of good names, you should also be good enough at it to save the name(s) and character concepts that you REALLY want and love for the one, two, six, whatever, characters you plan on sticking with.

> ... but all that SERVER SPACE!
I'm sure, if you are truly concerned with it, the EULA probably states somewhere that if D wants to delete your character, he can, retired or otherwise, accidentally or intentionally.
That said, diku would have to be immensely inefficient for even hundreds of (text only) character profiles with minimal desc to be noticed, let alone a concern for space used on today's computers.

> ... dead is dead
Torchwood already did that one. If you go to the river and don't plan on coming back, RP it that way. If you 'unretire', clearly your spirit finds it was not so ready to move on as the character thought it would be in life.
If YOU want to not be able to return when you seppuku, draw that line and don't cross it.

> ... but the AL thread...
... will become the retired thread. Cosmetic change, probably requires D to clarify character posting rules.

> ... but people will whine
... no matter what the IMMS do. That is not a symptom, it is an axiom.

I would suggest that if a character is set as 'retired', they should have a command they need to type in to become active again. Some of us OCD people will end up logging in every 4-6 weeks to see if it's gone yet, and thus it never will go. Also, items lost should be anything limited in numbers, even high limits.

Furthermore, I would suggest that delete only be disabled after the character has been around for, say, 2 days. That way, if you are PLing at 1AM to test basic mechanics for 4 hours, then delete/recreate, nothing changes.
If you spend a week wandering around and hopefully RPing, even if you're still in the exile sewers, you have probably done enough RPing that your new character should be, well, NEW!

Retire instead of delete also reduces the impact of attempts to punitively hack/delete an account or intentionally grief players into deleting at an OOC level.

We all know that when it comes to RP, drama, politics, and PK, there are times when the lines between IC and OOC can become blurred. We've all done it. That said, there is a line. If your main OOC goal is to try to intimidate, grief, or otherwise harass the other PLAYER, you just crossed it, even if no-one can prove/enforce it. It's like hacking someone's computer to beat them in counterstrike. Nice hack, but you still suck at counterstrike.

IMHO, anything that reduces the IC rewards that come from intentionally griefing a player to the point of character deletion is a win for the MUD. If you do not understand why, go into the MUD, type "help rules" and read rule #1.

tl;dr
retire doesn't actually HARM anyone except
a) griefers - shouldn't be trying to grief a player into deleting
b) people looking to delete;delete;recreate - can use a new name each time
c) protest deletions - Haven't worked since SK came online. Why would they work now?